The Legatine Capitulary of 786 has often been dismissed as the product of a fleeting papal mission reflecting primarily, if not exclusively, the legislative sensibilities of foreigners who lacked a clear understanding of Anglo-Saxon law and cultural practices. Scholars have tended to disregard it as an irrelevant one-off that, while perhaps containing a few details of historical interest, possessed no bearing on local affairs, let alone matters farther afield. As a result, there has been a general lack of interest regarding its importance for early medieval Northumbrian, Anglo-Saxon, and European legal history. This oversight is entirely unwarranted, as I have argued at length elsewhere. Taking my lead from Catherine Cubitt's work in Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, c.650–c.850, I have shown in several articles that the text was composed, or at least formatively influenced by Alcuin, a native Northumbrian; and, moreover, that it draws upon language and procedures deeply rooted in English customary law. The Legatine Capitulary stands out, therefore, not merely as a rare example of a legal document composed by a Northumbrian legislating for his own people in his native country, but as a Northumbrian law code in its own right. As such, it provides an uncommon glimpse into Anglo-Saxon legal practices, both ecclesiastical and secular, during the gap of more than a century between the Laws of Ine and the Laws of Alfred to which no surviving vernacular law code bears witness. These facts demand a re-evaluation of the document's significance for Northumbrian and Anglo-Saxon legal history.

Even less appreciated is the significance of the Legatine Capitulary for continental European legal history. While I have considered its bearing on English affairs in several prior articles, this chapter will focus on its importance in Francia. The document emerged during a period when the Carolingian reimagining of the capitulary tradition was barely in its nascence. Indeed, the Legatine Capitulary would appear to have played a formative role in that transformation. Charlemagne's increased reliance on capitularies as the main expression of his reform agenda is usually traced to the Admonitio generalis of 789, a document also composed, in part, by Alcuin just three years after he drafted the Legatine Capitulary. Given this timing, it is tempting to view the Legatine Capitulary as a kind of dry run in which Alcuin first began to reimagine the capitulary as a genre specifically designed to articulate the sweeping cultural reforms of the Carolingian Renovatio.